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(More customer reviews)Qualcomm is the Microsoft of the telecoms industry, for better and for worse. You either love the company or you hate the company; I'm leaning toward the latter, so please keep this in mind.
First, you have to give the company credit for getting to where it is today. Dave Mock does an excellent and meticulous job of documenting Qualcomm's against-all-odds rise to the top of the telecoms industry. I did not realize the degree to which Qualcomm relied on government business in the early days and also did not realize just how close the company came to missing the cellular boat completely. Back when Europe set in place one standard and many in the US wanted to follow suit, Qualcomm stuck to its guns.
And I think that the US is better off for it.
By and large, the mixed-standards "mess" that we have in the US has turned out to be a pretty good thing. Because of competing standards, we have EV-DO, which is a much-faster technology than single-standard Europe has to offer. Competing technologies keeps everyone on their toes, and Qualcomm has certainly kept the GPRS vendors on their toes. Dave Mock does a great job of documenting this drama and making sense of the very complex technical standards and jargon.
Mock is perhaps too kind to Qualcomm, particularly in the latter years, as the vendor transforms from David to Goliath. For example, the company has been in an all-out war with Wi-Fi and WiMAX over the past three years, and it is only recently that we now see the company starting to co-opt some of the same technology underlying WiMAX. Qualcomm recently ditched its much-hyped EVDV technology when it became brutally apparent that carriers want IP and big pipes, something WiMAX was designed to address from the ground up. I find Qualcomm to be a little lost these days, as if it is searching for another big bully to take on again; the trouble is, Qualcomm is now the big bully and it's taking on the types of innovators that it once was.
That said, anyone in the telecoms industry who wants to know how Qualcomm got to be Qualcomm should read this book.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Qualcomm Equation: How a Fledgling Telecom Company Forged a New Path to Big Profits and Market
How did a small, unknown company like Qualcomm manage to storm the wireless industry and grow into a multibillion dollar powerhouse in less than a decade? The Qualcomm Equation provides an in-depth look at Qualcomm's business model, as well as chronicling the exciting early history of the company. Readers will gain insight into the methods Qualcomm used to license a growing list of patents for profit, and learn from the key business strategies that enabled Qualcomm to leapfrog the competition.
